# Chapter 2

Michael saw a dream. A dream of that accident. A dream where he is a hero in a video game with an all powerful gun. A dream where he kills the man that drove that other car. He imagined his guts being penetrated with millions of bullets until there was nothing left of his flesh. He didn't see the man's face. He didn't know who he was. But... when he woke up, he knew very clearly that he wanted to kill him. Or least make him suffer as hard as he can. Molly has to be repaid, he thought. Molly has to be repaid...

Vodka plus is done out of slightly modified caffeine and taurine beverages that we would call today "Energy drinks". Experiments with these two highly addictive chemicals shown that under particular circumstances and with particular doses, the beverage might have a highly intoxicating effect. Vodka plus does not have your typical alcohol. It doesn't burn. It freezes. But it more than capable of making a person drunk.

One, perhaps underestimated aspect of Vodka plus's chemistry, is that it doesn't leave a hangover. Instead, even after the most outlandish and bollocks party, if you refrained yourself from drinking other things but vodka plus. You will wake up just like it is your usual morning. Though, quite frankly, this was not a usual morning for Michael.

He opened his eyes and almost immediately felt that he cannot move his legs. "Forgot to charge" he thought. The back was itching. So he scratched the edge of the spine device. Trying to get his fingers underneath the plastic. But with no success, the thing was glued on very firmly. Without too much looking around, he tossed his hand toward the usual position where he had the charging cable. To his amusement he didn't find there the cable. He found more bed. A moment of confusion had passed. "How far am I towards the window that I can't reach the cable?" he thought while tossing his other hand to the other side, to check the distance to the window. There too was more bed. This made Michael look around. Using a few uncomfortable tosses of his head back and forth he constructed enough of the picture. He was not at home. The place he saw, he saw for the first time.

After a few minutes of deep thought about a question of "Where the hell am I?" he came to a sudden unfortunate realization. Under the blanket he was completely nude. "I need to run!" he thought. And then quickly realized that if he doesn't charge the spine device, he would not be able to run anywhere. He tossed his head back and forth again. Trying to find some kind of cable, or perhaps his clothes. The room was empty. There was only the bed and the window. The window was bright, but there was some kind of stuff on it. It allowed light to come through, but no image from the outside could be seen. Michael even doubted that it was a window. Perhaps it was an artificial light source.

After a few seconds of thinking about the nature of this peculiar window, Michael started crawling. He knew how to crawl very well. This was not the first time he woke up with no battery, after all. At home, besides his bed, there would be a wheelchair just in case. Here though, we would need to, probably escape while crawling.

He used the blanket to cover himself as best as he could. And slowly made his way to the floor. Opening the door, was the next challenge. He was only 14 back then. Thought he was quite long, his hand could not reach the handle quite yet. He had to push himself with the other hand to reach the handle. He thought for a second, that in his own house, the door handles were much lower. As the door unshackled, he peeped through the gap ever so slightly. He was afraid that who ever abducted him would stay right besides the door. To his amusement, he found a corridor. Dimly lit with lines of blue neon stretching it's whole length at the bottom. The floor and the walls were polished to shine. He was alone, so he started crawling though the corridor.

As he crawled forward at a distance he made out an object. Small, but with a strange, to that place, saturation. As he made it towards the object, he realised that it was a toy. It was one of those toys you get in a package with a yogurt or chocolaty snack. A figure of a person with a blaster made out of cheap plastic. It was colorful. But not very interesting. Maybe it belonged to a different child... Perhaps one of the previous victims.

Suddenly he heard a door being open. It was not in front. And it was not the door he came out of. It was flush with the wall of the corridor. It was behind him and he didn't dare to look. What he did instead was to panic. He started crawling forward as fast as he could. So fast that the blanket fell off. After he reached the door in the end of the corridor and after trying to open it as well, he gave up. He laid face down with an anticipation of something bad. He was not sure what exactly would happen. Suddenly he felt something touch his skin from behind. He started yelling like a horror film scream queen.

"Shut up!" - said somebody with a high pitched voice - "Are you normal? ... Sorry, I saw your butt.". Michael looked around. He saw a girl. Dark hair, serious look on her face. The stuff that touched him was the blanket. She just covered him. "And one ball..." - she continued - "Please don't tell anybody.". The girl was about six or so years old. And visually she looked almost exactly like Molly. Michael closed his eyes and re-opened them again. Still he saw the same girl. Still she looked like Molly. "And a bit of the ... it ... Sorry" she continued. "Am I dead?" - said Michael. 

"You were almost, yesterday. You fell unconscious besides Frank's window. He called dad, and they rescued you."

It all started to make sense to Michael, but one point make him slightly confused, even thought he could find a few explanations to it. He asked her - "Why am I naked?". To which she said - "Your clothes were dripping wet.". Michael remembered seeing the rain droplets on the mega-structures. "Where are my clothes?" he asked her.

The girl ran away without uttering a word. Leaving Michael in silence to reflect on what had just happened. Was that Molly? Was she magically alive? Perhaps her mom just didn't want to see them and his dad after the accident. Did he know her? Or was that somebody else? He was not sure... Trying to find answers in his mind, he got multiple contradictory answers at once. From one side he remembered the crash, from the other side he didn't dare to remember Molly's death. From one side she looked just like Molly. From the other side, she was too young. Molly would be about ten, not about six. 

Michael already started to worry a little, when the girl ran back into the corridor with a pack of nicely prepared clothes. These were the clothes that he wore at night. Perfectly clean and dried. "Should I look away?" - she asked him while giving him the pack. "Ah..." Michael didn't know what to answer. He accepted the pack and tried to put the clothes while keeping himself under the blanket. "So what's your name?" - he asked her. The girl was rather shy. She didn't answer right away. Michael already started to regret asking her name in the first place. But then she breathed in deeply and said - "Molly".

